It's been a busy week for the Anti-Plasticites. First, the OCD-BPA crowd at JAMA got to yap some more about the dangers of the plastic component BPA, even after a comprehensive two-year study by the FDA failed to find any real risk from the stuff.

Perhaps feeling ignored, the Phthalate Phanatics sprung into action, so now we have another article about phthalates in the Journal Environment International.

The study and its recommendations, are too silly to debunk. But at ACSH, Debunk We Must, so I am obligated to do so if only to justify the meager pittance I'm paid. The Motown classic "It's the Same Old Song," which was recorded by the Four Tops in 1965 should go off in your head every time there is a new article about "endocrine disruptors." You better like Motown, because the term is thrown around more often than, well...

"The study is the first to compare phthalate exposures (2) in people who reported dining out to those more likely to enjoy home-cooked meals."

J. R. Varshavsky, et. al., Environmental International, In press

I find this statement to be a bit presumptuous. The corpses of the last three people who I prepared dinner for currently are passing through various stages of putrefaction. And my ex-wife, who used the smoke detector as a kitchen timer, is unlikely to become a sous chef anytime soon either. Nope, home-cooked meals are not necessarily enjoyable.

"[P]hthalates can enter the food supply from many different food contact materials, both upstream (e.g. processing equipment such as conveyor belts and industrial tubing) and downstream (e.g. food preparation products such as plastic wrap and food handling gloves."

Uh oh. If you eat food, you're screwed. But if you dare to eat it in any locations other than your home, then you're really screwed:

"Dining out may be an important source of biologically relevant cumulative phthalates exposure among the U.S. population"

Well, that really sucks because...

"Two-thirds of the U.S. population eat at least some food outside the home daily."

If people take this advice then the food service industry isn't going to be so happy. But it doesn't really matter because we're are all doomed either way:

Food contamination sources are difficult to distinguish between industries because phthalates can enter the food supply from many different food contact materials, both upstream (e.g. processing equipment such as conveyer belts and industrial tubing) and downstream (e.g. food preparation products such as plastic wrap and food handling gloves)

So if I'm getting this right, food itself is bad because if it touches anything then chemicals are gonna get you. Which is really going to present some logistical problems in terms of feeding 325 million people. How can we possibly get food that was never wrapped, sat on a conveyor belt or handled with gloves?

Your BS-O-Meter should be going off-scale now because the message has changed. Now, it's sugar, fat, and salt that are the bad guys, which now seem to carry equal weight as the icky phthalates from the restaurant. Is this paper about phthalates or foods that the authors want us to avoid? In the end, really doesn't matter.

For what it's worth, the study itself was done rather well (3) but so what? Do we really need 13 pages and 100+ references to conclude something that is irrelevant? Two-thirds of the US eats at restaurants. No matter what this silly study concludes or how well it was conducted two-thirds of the US will continue to eat in restaurants.

That's a wrap.

NOTES:

(1) Here's a scientifically accurate definition for chemicals that are called endocrine disruptors:

"Any chemical, endogenous or exogenous, that binds to a hormone receptor and elicits a physiological response. The chemical that binds may be either a full or partial agonist or antagonist."

(2) The term "phthalate exposure" is technically inaccurate. Phthalate levels were not measured. Phthalate metabolites in urine were used as a surrogate measure. This tells us that the tiny amount of phthalates that we are exposed to are being metabolized by the liver to produce water-soluble breakdown products, which are then excreted in the urine. Just the way life is supposed to work. The study was well-planned and conducted, but ultimately meaningless.

(3) The study was prospective rather than retrospective. Although the data were based on subject recall, a notoriously inaccurate method, the volunteers recorded their eating habits daily, which makes recall far less prone to error. And the statistics are very tight. Too bad it wasted.

Dr. Josh Bloom, the Director of Chemical and Pharmaceutical Science, is a recognized expert on the opioid crisis and was the first journalist to write a nationally published opinion piece about the unintended consequences of a governmental crackdown on prescriptions opioids (New York Post, 2013). Since that time he has published more than a dozen op-eds in regional and national newspapers on different aspects of the crisis. In that same year, he testified at an FDA hearing and was the only speaker to note that fentanyl was the real killer, something that would be proven years later.

He was also the first writer (2016) to study, dissect and ultimately debunk the manipulated statistics used by the CDC to justify its recommendations for opioid prescribing, which have resulted in draconian requirements for prescribing pain medications as well as government-mandated, involuntary tapering of patients receiving opioid treatment, both of which have caused great harm and needless suffering to chronic pain patients. His 2016 article, "Six Charts Designed to Confuse You," is the seminal work on CDC deception and has been adopted by patient advocacy groups and individuals and has been sent to governors and state legislatures.

Dr. Bloom earned his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of Virginia, followed by postdoctoral training at the University of Pennsylvania. He worked for more than two decades in drug discovery research at Lederle Laboratories, which was acquired by Wyeth in 1994, which itself was acquired by Pfizer in 2009. During this time he conducted research in a number of therapeutic areas, including diabetes and obesity, antibiotics, HIV/AIDS, hepatitis C, and oncology. His group discovered the novel antibiotic Tygacil®, which was approved by the FDA for use against resistant bacterial infections in 2005. He is the author of 25 patents, and 35 academic papers, including a chapter on new therapies for hepatitis C in Burger’s Medicinal Chemistry, Drug Discovery and Development, 7th Edition (Wiley, 2010), and has given numerous invited lectures about how the pharmaceutical industry really works.

Dr. Bloom joined the American Council on Science and Health in 2010 as ACSH’s Director of Chemical and Pharmaceutical Sciences, and has since published 50 op-eds in numerous periodicals, including The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, New Scientist, The New York Post, National Review Online, The Boston Herald, and The Chicago Tribune, and given numerous radio and television interview on topics related to drugs and chemicals. In 2014, Dr. Bloom was invited to become a featured writer for the site Science 2.0, where he wrote more 75 pieces on a broad range of topics.

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